The acrimony of the SSM debate owes much to the fact that the hard core activists masquerading under the equality banner on the Yes side are leading the naïve romantics under the love is love banner – and No voters lump them all together. The former wish to change society to their liking, the latter are their ‘useful idiots’.
Some in the general LGBTQI community have already voiced their concerns about the venom spewing from the Yes activists, and heterosexual Yes voters have also expressed a non-plussed displeasure, not least Yes voting lefty Graham Richardson. They are missing the main game, I suggest. The extreme Yes is fighting for a social(ist) revolution, nothing less, hence the vitriol and bullying.
Do we really think that this extreme vehemence is just about a word? While it certainly isn’t about equality of any kind, or fairness, what is being hidden is that which lurks in the darkness of the agenda, that which is not spoken, an agenda that merely starts with the appropriation of the word marriage. It’s no secret, despite it being ignored: it was articulated very clearly as long ago as 1983, as Julia Patrick reminded us in The Spectator Australia cover story, September 23, 2017, Tying the Gordian knot.
She writes: “Evan Wolfson had been on the scene since his 1983 Harvard Law School dissertation on homosexual marriage – the beginning of his crusade.
Wolfson’s insight was that although there was no shortage of various outfits all promoting the homosexual agenda, the successes on many fronts – discrimination or AIDS – were piecemeal, and the key to real progress was concentrating on a core theme: his obsession with marriage … Referring to civil unions as ‘the stigma of exclusion’, Wolfson was determined that the word must be marriage. ‘I’m not in this just to change the law’, he wrote, ‘It’s about changing society’.”
Wolfson was reading straight our of the communist manifesto on this topic, as articulated (among others) by Alexandra Kollontai, the 19th century Russian communist revolutionary, who maintained that “the old type of family has had its day … the worker mother must learn not to differentiate between yours and mine. [She] must remember that there are only our children, the children of Russia’s communist workers … Communist society will take upon itself all the duties involved in the education of the child.” Gosh, wouldn’t that be something of an education. And something of a future …
Following in their footsteps is contemporary American agitator, Melissa Harris-Perry (ex-msnbc network). She made it clear on air that in the world view she shares, children belong to the community, not their parents (as if children belonged to anybody):
“We have never invested as much in public education as we should have, because we’ve always had kind of a private notion of children. ‘Your kid is yours, and totally your responsibility.’ We haven’t had a very collective notion of ‘These are our children.’ So part of it is, we have to break through our kind of private idea that kids belong to their parents, or kids belong to their families, and recognize that kids belong to whole communities. Once it’s everybody’s responsibility, and not just the household’s, then we start making better investments.”
This is the real agenda, the actual battleground; it’s not the word marriage, not the simple idea of two people getting married, not wedding parties held with gay abandon. It’s about controlling the present and the future by educating our children and grandchildren in a socialist dogma that destroys the freedoms we now cherish. Like educating our own children, for a start.